> 
> As I understand it, OS2 was demonstrating hot
> plug-and-play of multiple
> identical cards in the early nineties.  Microsoft
> still requires a
> rebooting.  I don't know if hotplugging anything
> other than PCMCIA cards
> and disk drives works with linux kernels or not.
> 
While not hot plugable, the Amiga OS & hardware first
used the term plug & play about 1987 and meant it.
When the system powered up it inquired 'Who, What,
Where & What do you need?' to anything attached to the
Zorro bus. Then it sorted things out, assigned
resources and finished booting. Got ram on three
cards, plus the motherboard? No problem Autoconfig(r)
pools it and assigns it where needed. Done with a
resource? Intuition(r) puts it out for reuse. Two
programs need to use the widget.library? (think .dll)
Sure, throw it into memory and every program can use
the same one copy. We don't need no stinking extra
.dll copies!

Hell, I never even heard of an interrupt until I
started fitting junk PC's together. DMA? Don't they
give out some kinda awards?

If this were a technocracy we'd all be using third or
fourth generation Betacams & Bill Gates would be
trying to market Word 3.1.

Oh, well!

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